Leon V. Sigal – 38 Northhttps://www.38north.org
Informed analysis of events in and around North KoreaThu, 09 Jan 2020 17:31:02 +0000en-US
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1 Premature Epitaphs for Nuclear Diplomacy with North Koreahttps://www.38north.org/2020/01/lsigal200109/
Thu, 09 Jan 2020 16:30:37 +0000https://www.38north.org/?p=19063Introduction “The report of my death was an exaggeration,” Mark Twain once wrote to a reporter. The same could be…

“The report of my death was an exaggeration,” Mark Twain once wrote to a reporter. The same could be said of the news media’s premature epitaphs for US President Trump’s nuclear diplomacy with North Korea. The past two months have seen a spate of such speculation, quoting skeptics or outright opponents of negotiating who are certain that Pyongyang never intended to denuclearize, misread what happened in past talks and disparaged Trump’s summit meetings with Kim Jong Un while ignoring what has been happening in lower-level talks. Instead of detailed investigative reporting on the negotiations and how much, if anything, may have changed, the news was often framed as a contrast between Trump’s hyperbole about his negotiating prowess and his lack of success in the denuclearization of North Korea.

Same Old Pyongyang?

Many accounts make it seem as if nothing new is happening, but now, unlike the US failure to implement the 1994 Agreed Framework or the 2005 Six Party Joint Statement, the hang-up in negotiations is due more to Pyongyang than Washington.

To many critics of the Trump administration’s North Korea policy, the reason is obvious: the North was determined all along to arm itself with nuclear weapons and the missiles to target the United States and was never serious about negotiating.

That criticism overlooks Pyongyang’s willingness to stop making fissile material for weapons for over a decade in the 1990s—at a time when it had no nuclear weapons. It also ignores its offer to end development, production and deployment of longer-range missiles in the summer of 2000.

More fundamentally, critics seem unaware of or skeptical about the North’s aim, initiated by Kim Il Sung and pursued ever since, of seeking to end enmity with the United States, as well as South Korea and Japan, in order to hedge against China’s growing power as well as reduce its economic dependence on Beijing. And they seem oblivious to what North Koreans have been telling some Americans for years about the Kims’ ultimate aim: an alliance with Washington like the one the United States has with South Korea or Japan. Whether the North still means it remains to be tested in negotiations—negotiations that many of the critics oppose.

In the month-long run-up to Kim Jong Un’s December 31, 2019 report to the Korean Workers’ Party plenary, the news media overwhelmingly echoed the views of such skeptics. Many predicted Kim would announce an end to negotiations.

Bolstering Kim’s Leverage

Instead of focusing on his authoritative end-of-year deadline for a change in US policy promulgated in Kim’s pivotal April 12 address,[1] reporters latched on to a rhetorical flourish of the DPRK’s new vice foreign minister for American affairs who warned of a “Christmas gift” in an effort to compel Washington to make further concessions.[2]

The news media then solicited experts’ opinions of what the North might test, thereby lending even more leverage to the North’s coercive diplomacy than Kim himself would in his end-of-year report.

Beyond Summitry

Particularly egregious examples of such flawed reporting are two prominent stories in leading US newspapers: David Nakamura’s left-hand lead in the January 2 Washington Post, “Pressure to Shift N. Korean Strategy,” and David Sanger’s page-one story in the January 2 New York Times, “Trump’s Talk Fails to Quell Twin Threats.”[3]

Nakamura’s account opens with two questionable assertions:

President Trump’s decision to engage directly with Kim Jong Un was premised on the bet that three decades of U.S. policy failures to contain North Korea’s nuclear program could be reversed by skipping over lower-level diplomatic talks and starting at the top of its authoritarian regime.

But 19 months after the two leaders’ first summit, the negotiations have broken down along the same sticking point as past efforts: how much sanctions relief the United States is willing to offer in exchange for how much of its arsenal Pyongyang is willing to dismantle.

The claim that negotiations began at the Singapore Summit ignores months of behind-the-scenes talks between the two sides’ intelligence officials and diplomats that began in spring 2017. The contention that the breakdown in talks came over sanctions relief oversimplifies the North’s objectives, which also include an end to joint US-ROK military exercises, diplomatic normalization, a peace treaty to end the Korean War and a clear commitment to reconcile—end enmity—as well as rebuffing the US demand for a written pledge to complete denuclearization without a reciprocal US commitment to some sort of security partnership.

A “New Way”

Nakamura then quotes former State Department official Evans Revere,

We now have a reaffirmation from the highest levels of the North Korean regime that they are determined to go as quickly as they can down the nuclear path. They are reiterating and strengthening some of their threats. This is essentially affirmation that nothing much has changed at the end of the day.

Pyongyang may be determined to speed up arming, but that is not quite what Kim Jong Un told his party plenary. While emphasizing “self-reliance” and a revival of economic orthodoxy and blaming sanctions, he did not rule out resuming talks and strongly implied that his self-imposed moratorium on nuclear and ICBM tests as well as any acceleration of arming was conditioned on a softening of the US negotiating stance toward the North. Accusing Washington of delaying tactics at the negotiating table and calling for a “frontal breakthrough politically, diplomatically and militarily,” he warned: “In the future, the more the US stalls for time and hesitates in the settlement of the US-DPRK relations, the more helpless it will find itself before the might of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea getting stronger …” On the other hand, he said, “[T]he scope and depth of bolstering our deterrent will be properly coordinated depending on the U.S. future attitude to the DPRK.”[4]

By stressing continuity with the past, Revere also ignores what has changed ever since the failed Hanoi Summit meeting in February 2019. Pyongyang is insisting that Washington take unilateral steps to demonstrate its willingness to reconcile before the North will return to the negotiating table. It is not clear whether this is due to its much stronger bargaining position as its nuclear and missile leverage increases and the US “maximum pressure” campaign loses steam, or is the result of pushback in Pyongyang from orthodox opposition in the party to economic engagement and hardline resistance in the military to any nuclear compromise. In either case, Pyongyang is confident, perhaps overly so, and may be tempted to overplay its hand.

Nakamura then quotes a Democratic foreign policy aide in the Senate, “It’s clear what North Korea thinks denuclearization constitutes and what it does not constitute,” and adds, “Analysts have said North Korea has long defined the term as meaning the United States would withdraw its nuclear-defense umbrella from South Korea and Japan as a prerequisite for any large-scale dismantlement of its own program.” These analysts overlook what North Korean officials have been telling Americans for years, that it wants a security partnership with Washington backed by a continued US troop presence on the peninsula and even a US “nuclear umbrella.” As US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, possibly echoing what US officials were hearing from the North, told an NHK interviewer on June 7, 2019, “We want to achieve a fundamentally different strategic relationship between our two countries.”[5] It may have been the first and last time a US official said that. If so, Washington has yet to test Pyongyang’s seriousness about security cooperation in negotiations.

In conclusion, Nakamura quotes Brookings Institution analyst Jung Pak, a former US intelligence official on Korea matters, “The question looking back is: Were we in a special moment in 2018 and 2019? I don’t think it was. It was a blip rather than a big inflection point,” Pak said. “The U.S. and North Korea are fundamentally at odds in their strategic objectives. No amount of letters or phone conversations or summits at the leader level is going to shake that loose.” Perhaps so, but how can anyone be so certain without probing Pyongyang further.

It’s Not Just the Economy

The Times’ Sanger weighs in with a more nuanced approach, but he still focuses on the contrast between Trump’s claims and his lack of diplomatic success. “Kim Jong-un’s declaration,” Sanger writes, “that the world would ‘witness a new strategic weapon’ seemed to be the end of an 18-month experiment in which Mr. Trump believed his force of personality—and vague promises of economic development—would wipe away a problem that plagued the last 12 of his predecessors.” Sanger goes on, “The core problem may have been Mr. Trump’s conviction that economic incentives alone—oil profits in Tehran and the prospect of investment and glorious beach-front hotels in North Korea—would overcome all other national interests.”

His focus on Trump’s “force of personality” and preoccupation with real estate fails to account for changes in the US negotiating position prior to Hanoi and since. In a meeting with Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang in October 2018, Secretary of State Pompeo put an offer of an end-of-war declaration on the negotiating table, paving the way to a peace process on the peninsula. It remains there. And that’s not all Washington has put on the negotiating table. In the run-up to Hanoi, it offered to exchange liaison offices as a step toward diplomatic normalization and allowed some exemptions from U.N. Security Council sanctions to deliver humanitarian aid.

Sanger goes on, “Mr. Trump’s team, internally divided, could not back itself out of the corner the president created with his vow of no serious sanctions relief until the arsenal was disbanded. Mr. Trump did cancel joint military exercises with South Korea—over Pentagon objections—but that was not enough for Mr. Kim.” Sanger seems wrong on both counts. The Trump administration began edging away from the all-or-nothing approach soon after Hanoi. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 10, Secretary of State Pompeo was asked if sanctions would not be eased until complete denuclearization. “I want to leave a little space there,” he replied. “From time to time, there are particular provisions, if we were making substantial progress, where one might think that was the right thing to do.” In Stockholm last October, US Special Representative on North Korea Stephen Biegun discussed further sanctions relief, but whether he offered to allow exports of textiles or coal for three years’ time in return for a fissile material cutoff is not clear from the public record. Moreover, Trump did not cancel joint military exercises at Hanoi, but suspended them conditionally—only to reverse course soon thereafter with the kickoff of a command post exercises on March 4.

Sanger quotes Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations,

‘After three years of no international crises, [Trump is] facing one with Iran because he has rejected diplomacy and another with North Korea because he has asked too much of diplomacy.

In neither case has Trump embraced traditional diplomacy, putting forward a partial or interim pact in which a degree of restraint would be met with a degree of sanctions relief.’

After the Hanoi Summit, Washington did propose just such a “‘partial or interim pact,’” but Sanger is quick to disparage that:

[B]uried in Mr. Kim’s New Year’s statement was a suggestion of what he really had in mind: talks with the United States about the ‘scope and depth’ of the North’s nuclear force. That means he really is not interested in denuclearization at all. He is interested in arms-control talks, like the United States conducted for decades with the Kremlin.

Maybe so, but without further negotiations, how can anyone know for sure.

]]>To Restart North Korea Talks: Return to Singaporehttps://www.38north.org/2019/06/lsigal061319/
Thu, 13 Jun 2019 22:10:47 +0000https://www.38north.org/?p=17839A year has passed since the first-ever US-DPRK summit in Singapore and US President Donald Trump still wants a third…

A year has passed since the first-ever US-DPRK summit in Singapore and US President Donald Trump still wants a third get-together with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. If so, negotiations will need to resume soon. That will require Washington to tell Pyongyang directly that it is ready to get over the Hanoi Summit, where it asked for too much, and go back to the commitments to end enmity that it made in Singapore.

There were three such commitments: “to establish new U.S.–DPRK relations,” “to build a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula,” and “to work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” The North also pledged to unearth the remains of Americans missing in action, which could help put the Korean War to rest—and not just for those most intimately affected.

In an April 12 address to his Supreme People’s Assembly, Kim Jong Un made it clear that moving to end enmity and improve the North’s security, more than easing sanctions, are essential for him to resume negotiations: “[I]t will be hard to expect any progress” without “a fundamental liquidation” of the “hostile policy of the U.S….”

He called the Singapore joint statement “a landmark in establishing the new DPRK-U.S. relations,” but cited “open hostile moves running counter to” that statement, specifically, “the U.S. recent test simulating the interception of [an] ICBM from the DPRK and the resumption of the military exercises whose suspension was directly committed to by the U.S. president.”

He went on,

Now the U.S. is strongly suggesting it’s thinking of holding the 3rd DPRK-U.S. summit talks and the settlement of the issue through dialogue. Yet it is still shunning the withdrawal of its hostile policy, the fundamental way of establishing the new DPRK-U.S. relations, and miscalculating that it can bring us to our knees if it puts maximum pressure on us.

He dismissed the US negotiating position at Hanoi as “absolutely impracticable,” noting that “it is necessary for both sides not to table their unilateral demands but find out a constructive solution to meeting each other’s interests.” If that change in stance is “shared with us,” he is prepared to resume talks,” but he warned that he would not hold his fire for long: “[W]e will wait for a bold decision from the U.S. until the end of this year.”[1]

Yet Washington was not alone in overreaching in Hanoi. So did Pyongyang. In the months preceding Hanoi, the two sides had begun sketching out the makings of a limited first-stage deal. In talks in Pyongyang in October 2018, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had put an end-of-war declaration on the table, Kim Jong Un offered “the dismantlement and destruction of North Korea’s plutonium and uranium enrichment facilities…‘and more, ’” according to US Special Representative for North Korea Stephen Biegun.

It has already accepted three of Kim’s desires, a downsizing of large-scale exercises on the peninsula, an end-of-war declaration, and an exchange of liaison offices as a step to full diplomatic normalization.

Where it came up short was on sanctions relief. Washington has allowed some exemptions from UN Security Council sanctions for the resumption of humanitarian aid delivery. It is also prepared to relax some US sanctions, or as Biegun phrased it at Stanford, “We didn’t say we won’t do anything until you do everything.”

If Pyongyang is willing to shut down not only Yongbyon, but also its second enrichment site and allow inspectors to witness that, and commit to dismantlement after inspectors take measurements of production there, Washington will have to offer more relief in return, like exempt the reopening of the Kaesong Industrial Complex from Security Council sanctions, increase the UN quota for oil imports by North Korea, allow some textile exports, and end US sanctions originally imposed by the Trading with the Enemy Act and eased twice before.

Replying to Kim Jong Un’s latest letter to President Trump provides an opportunity to tell him what he wants to hear, that Washington has moved past Hanoi and back to Singapore.

]]>President Donald J. Trump is greeted by Kim Jong Un, Chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2019, at the Sofitel Legend Metropole hotel in Hanoi, for their second summit meeting. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead.)

The Hanoi Summit failed because both US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un overreached, demanding too much and offering too little. Yet each side put enough on the negotiating table for the makings of a deal. The need now is to resume talks—the sooner the better, perhaps with South Korea’s help—with the aim of having both sides offer a little more for a little more.

The summit story is now trickling out. In a useful first draft of history, the right-hand lead story in The New York Times by David Sanger and Edward Wong on Saturday, March 2 reveals the crux of the collapse:

In a dinner at the Metropole Hotel [on February 27]…Mr. Kim had resisted what Mr. Trump presented as a grand bargain: North Korea would trade all its nuclear weapons, material and facilities for an end to the American-led sanctions squeezing its economy…

…Mr. Kim also miscalculated. He bet Mr. Trump might accept a more modest offer that American negotiators in Hanoi had already dismissed: The North would dismantle the Yongbyon nuclear complex, three square miles of aging facilities at the heart of the nuclear program, for an end to the sanctions most harmful to its economy, those enacted since 2016.

It is essential to unpack what Sanger reported.

Some were quick to blame summitry. Sanger made this case explicit in his story a day earlier:

The split underscored the risk of leader-to-leader diplomacy: When it fails, there are few places to go, no higher-up to step in and cut a compromise that saves the deal.

In this case, the price may be high—especially if Mr. Kim responds to the failure by further accelerating his production of nuclear fuel and a frustrated Mr. Trump swings from his expressions of “love” for the North Korean dictator and back to the “fire and fury” language of early in his presidency.

“No deal is better than a bad deal, and the president was right to walk,” said Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations. “But this should not have happened,” he said. “A busted summit is the risk you run when too much faith is placed in personal relations with a leader like Kim, when the summit is inadequately prepared, and when the president had signaled he was confident of success.”

Similar stories appeared throughout the news media, along with relief in some circles that President Trump didn’t give away the store for the sake of just any deal.

Yet leader-to-leader diplomacy had its benefits as well as risks. North Korea is not like other states. It is extremely centralized. All authoritative decisions come from the very top down and anyone who contravenes them does so at his peril. Secretary of State Pompeo understood this rationale for summitry: “And when you’re dealing with a country that is the nature of North Korea, it is often the case that only the most senior leaders have the capacity to make those important decisions.” Kim Jong Un’s engagement is critical to moving a sclerotic policy process.

The US system is very different, but summitry still serves a useful purpose. With its dispersion of power and intense political rivalries, especially in the chaotic Trump administration, the president’s interest in a second summit meeting created an action-forcing process that engaged the time and attention of his senior officials, leading to many useful changes in the US negotiating position in the weeks leading up to the summit. This process made advances possible. Given the intense establishment, partisan and bureaucratic opposition to various inducements, a comprehensive package solution was politically impossible to muster, which made a detailed road map to denuclearization out of the question. Instead, Washington adopted a step-by-step approach that, if implemented, would engender a modicum of mutual trust.

A Better Understanding of What Pyongyang Wants

Critics have focused on the rushed last-minute preparations for the second summit. That critique ignores the preceding months of meetings between the two sides’ diplomatic and intelligence officials, which gave Washington a better appreciation of Pyongyang’s bottom line: US movement to end enmity and reconcile with it in order to reduce its political and economic dependence on China. Sanctions relief alone would not satisfy the North; the overall relationship will have to be addressed, including its security needs. That was clear from the Singapore Summit last June, when both sides pledged in the joint statement to “establish new US-DPRK relations” and “build a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula.”

Hanoi was an especially suitable locale for underscoring the end of enmity given Vietnam’s fraught history with China and its postwar reconciliation with the United States. “The success of the Vietnamese economy is due to its decision to normalize relations with the United States in 1995,” Maj. Gen. Le Van Cuong, former director of the Institute of Strategic Studies at the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security, told the Times. “I would say to our North Korean friends that as long as they have a conflict with the United States, they will not be able to develop their economy properly,” General Cuong said, adding, “China will try every possible tactic to keep North Korea in its arms because it wants a country to control.” “Luckily, North Korea has the necessary conditions to escape China’s grip if it deepens its relationship with America.”[1]

Washington Shifts its Negotiating Stance

On the way to the summit, Washington moved to address Pyongyang’s concerns. The first step was suspension and then scaling down of large-scale joint exercises on the Korean Peninsula, which was done at the president’s behest.

The next step came during Pompeo’s return visit to Pyongyang in October 2018. At an earlier meeting that July, as Sanger reports, “Mr. Kim declined to see him.” Sanger does not say why, but a likely reason is that Pompeo was not authorized to put on the negotiating table US willingness to commit to declaring an end to the Korean War, as Kim had been led to expect at the Singapore Summit, so Kim snubbed him. Without that commitment, Pompeo’s next planned visit that August was called off, lest it result in another failed mission and no meeting with Kim. Without that commitment, the North Koreans would also not meet with the newly named US Special Representative for North Korea Stephen Biegun.

Finally, in early October, after word reached Pyongyang that Washington was prepared to make that commitment, Pompeo returned to put the end-of-war declaration on the negotiating table and spent over five hours with Kim. In the course of those meetings, Biegun told an audience at Stanford University, Kim, in an unprecedented offer, committed “to the dismantlement and destruction of North Korea’s plutonium and uranium enrichment facilities…‘and more.’”

Kim, however, told Pompeo he was unwilling to provide a complete inventory of nuclear and missile assets and their locations, lest they be attacked. In another useful step, Washington then decided to phase in the inventory declaration instead, as Vice President Mike Pence hinted on November 15.[2] Critics may carp but the administration is right to phase in that inventory declaration, starting with the location of its plutonium reactors, reprocessing and enrichment sites. Before seeking an accounting of fissile material and number of weapons, it is prudent to seek access to these locations as well as the North’s nuclear-weapons test sites, its uranium mines, its ore refining plants, and its uranium hexafluoride plant to take various measurements that better enable it to assess how much fissile material the North could have produced. This nuclear archeology will reduce uncertainty. Since US intelligence estimates vary widely, any number the North would turn over of its stockpiled fissile material is certain to be controversial, as was the case in the initial declaration to the IAEA in 1992, which is now nearly forgotten but for years complicated efforts to contain the growing security threat posed by North Korea’s continued fissile material and missile production and testing.

During the run-up to this year’s summit, the United States also offered to exchange liaison offices in the two countries’ capitals, which Kim accepted in Hanoi. And it had scaled back joint military exercises on or near the Korean Peninsula.

Where Washington fell short was sanctions relief. It had recently approved several exemptions from UN Security Council sanctions for NGOs to resume delivery of humanitarian aid. It was also prepared to relax some US sanctions, or as Biegun hinted at Stanford, “We didn’t say we won’t do anything until you do everything.”

While it was willing to offer some of what Pyongyang wanted, as Biegun laid out, Washington still demanded a lot more in return. It wanted the verifiable suspension of all fissile material production throughout North Korea with a commitment to dismantle the production sites after measurements of production were taken. It sought a halt to production of ballistic missiles that could reach Japan and beyond. And it wanted access to other sites for nuclear archeology.

On the eve of the summit, US negotiators narrowed their focus to suspending all the fissile material production with a written commitment to their ultimate dismantlement, as Kim Jong Un told Pompeo. But DPRK negotiators fell short of offering that while seeking excessive sanctions relief in return. As Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho explained in a post-summit press conference in Hanoi:

[I]f the United States lifts a part of the United Nations [UN] sanctions, in other words, the provision of sanctions that impact the civilian economy and people’s living standards, then we will permanently, completely dismantle entire nuclear materials production facilities of Yongbyon area, including plutonium and uranium, through a joint work of technicians from both countries in the presence of US experts. What we proposed was not the complete lifting of sanctions, but their partial lifting. In particular, out of the 11 UN sanctions resolutions all together, we proposed the lifting of the five groups first from those that were adopted from 2016 to 2017, especially the articles that impede the civilian economy and the people’s livelihood among them.[3]

Ri seemed to rule out a missile production halt or access to other sites for now, never mind a grand bargain, by saying, “Given the current level of trust between the two countries of [North] Korea and the United States, this is the biggest stride of denuclearization measure that we can take at the present stage.” He also cast doubt on shutting down a suspect uranium enrichment site: “[D]uring the talks, the United States held out for a claim until the end that one more thing, other than the measure for dismantlement of the nuclear facilities of the Yongbyon area, needs to be done and thus, it became clear that the United States is not prepared to accommodate our offer. At this stage, it is hard to say here whether a better agreement, than what we have offered, could be reached.”

A background briefing by a senior State Department official offered an expansive, perhaps excessive, interpretation of the North Korean demands on sanctions: “[I]f you review the UN Security Council resolutions you’ll see that includes—the sanctions themselves include a broad range of products, including metals, raw materials, transportation, seafood, coal exports, refined petroleum imports, raw petroleum imports. We asked the North Koreans to clarify for us what they meant…and it was basically all the sanctions except for armaments.”

The situation seems to have changed during the summit after the DPRK’s offer fell short of what Kim had told Pompeo last October. Some attribute the shift to Michael Cohen’s testimony before Congress. “Trump could have had a small deal,” Joseph Yun, the former State Department special envoy for North Korea, told Sanger. “Close a few sites, and lift a few sanctions. But because of Cohen, the president needed a big deal.” In either event, it was an opening for President Trump to up the ante and ensure the rejection of a deal. The senior State Department official hinted that the US ask included chemical and biological weapons: “[T]he dilemma that we were confronted with is that the North Koreans at this point are unwilling to impose a complete freeze on their weapons of mass destruction programs…The President in his discussions challenged the North Koreans to go bigger.”

Getting Over the Summit

The summit was a disappointment, not a disaster. With both sides wanting far more than they were prepared to concede in return, the gap between them widened. Now the task is to close that gap.

Shutting down all the fissile material production facilities in Yongbyon is not enough. The North will have to suspend fissile material production at all sites and commit to dismantling them once measurements are taken to gauge how much they might have produced. Pyongyang will also need to do what they were prepared to do in Hanoi. As Foreign Minister Ri revealed, “During the meeting, we expressed our intent to make a commitment on a permanent suspension of nuclear testing and long-range rocket launch tests in writing in order to lower the concerns of the United States.”[4] Carrying out these commitments will, in turn, require much more sanctions relief than Washington has yet offered, including an exemption for reopening the Kaesong Industrial Complex jointly operated by the North and South and resumption of South Korean tourism at Mount Kumgang in the North, an increased UN quota for oil imports to the North, and ending the US Trading with the Enemy Act sanctions, which previous presidents eased and then re-imposed. The administration needs to test whether relaxing sanctions will yield more than tightening them, making North Korea more dependent on South Korea than on China for a change.

In short, the makings of a first stage deal are there. As Secretary of State Pompeo put it, “There has to be a theory of the case of how to move forward. I’m confident there is one.” He did not say, but going back to a step-by-step approach is essential. Washington needs to stop swinging for the fences and remember that singles and doubles drive in many more runs.

]]>Misreporting the Trump Administration’s Boffo Break with the Failed North Korea Policy of the Pasthttps://www.38north.org/2019/02/lsigal020519/
Tue, 05 Feb 2019 15:58:00 +0000https://www.38north.org/?p=16988The US Special Representative for North Korea Stephen R. Biegun broke important new ground on administration policy toward Pyongyang in…

]]>Robert Carlin (left) and US Special Representative for North Korea Stephen E. Biegun (right) have a discussion at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford. (Photo: L.A. Cicero and Stanford University.)

The US Special Representative for North Korea Stephen R. Biegun broke important new ground on administration policy toward Pyongyang in a far-reaching presentation at Stanford University last Thursday, January 31. You’d never know that from most news accounts that Biegun confirmed Kim Jong Un’s commitment, made at his last meeting with Secretary of State Pompeo, to “dismantle” all of North Korea’s plutonium and uranium fissile material production facilities at Yongbyon and elsewhere “and more”; reaffirmed statements made by President Trump and Pompeo that the administration was prepared to move step-by-step toward complete denuclearization “simultaneously and in parallel” toward peace in Korea, starting with a peace declaration; and hinted at US willingness to relax some sanctions before complete and verified denuclearization had been achieved and to defer a complete declaration of North Korea’s nuclear assets. In short, Biegun revealed several major shifts in US negotiating positions and most of the press was asleep at the wheel.

Arguably, Biegun’s most important point was completely lost on most reporters: For example, “…[I]n parallel we’re willing to look at a lot of other things that we can do together that also build the confidence and reduce the sense of risk or threat that would potentially drive a country to want to sustain that kind of capacity.”[1] Under probing questioning by long-time North Korea analyst Robert Carlin, he spelled that out:

[W]e have the potential here for a grave threat to the United States of America, and therefore it is all the more urgent that we engage diplomatically with North Korea to seeif we can change the trajectory of their policies by changing the trajectory of our own. And that’s what we’re trying to do…I could not have a better mandate. I have four streams of potential cooperation to discuss with North Korea: transforming our relations, building a permanent peace on the Korean Peninsula, denuclearization, and the fourth, which I’ve addressed briefly here, which is the return of remains from the Korean War— doesn’t involve the same level of negotiation, but should emphasize it’s every bit as important that we heal the wound of that war as part of the process of resolving the larger dispute on the Korean Peninsula. And the good news is we’re making a lot of progress in that regard, as I mentioned. But in the other areas, what’s complicit in that is this is—at the core of this, is denuclearization. It absolutely—the essential test of this is removing the weapons of mass destruction programs in North Korea. But the issue is much larger than that. It’s something of a trite trick in Washington that when you can’t solve the problem, you enlarge the problem, but here the President has embraced it full on. I mean it—excuse me—I don’t mince my words when I say that he is unconstrained by the assumptions of his predecessors. President Trump is ready to end this war. It is over. It is done. We are not going to invade North Korea. We are not seeking to topple the North Korean regime. We need to advance our diplomacy alongside our plans for denuclearization in a manner that sends that message clearly to North Korea as well. We are ready for a different future. It’s bigger than denuclearization….But I am absolutely convinced, and more importantly, the President of the United States is convinced that it’s time to move past 70 years of war and hostility on the Korean Peninsula. There is no reason for this conflict to persist any longer.[2]

That was the strongest indication yet that Washington has put a peace declaration on the negotiating table.

Biegun characterized this moment as “an inflection point”:

We will sustain the pressure campaign; at the same time, we are trying to advance the diplomatic campaign, and we have to find the right balance between those two. Areas like cultural exchanges or people-to-people initiatives that you described seem to me a very obvious place where we could begin to make progress in that environment.

Ultimately, he made clear, the Trump administration is open to support for North Korea’s economic development:

At the appropriate time, with the completion of denuclearization, we are prepared to explore with North Korea and many other countries the best way to mobilize investment, improve infrastructure, enhance food security, and drive a level of economic engagement that will allow the North Korean people to fully share in the rich future of their Asian neighbors. This prosperity, along with the denuclearization and peace, lies at the core of President Trump’s vision for U.S.-North Korea relations

Instead of focusing on the larger picture, most news accounts emphasized the urgency of obtaining a complete inventory of North Korea’s new nuclear assets. AFP’s Shaun Tandon’s lede read, “A US negotiator called Thursday on North Korea to provide a detailed account of its weapons to seal a peace deal, saying President Donald Trump was ready to offer a future that includes diplomatic relations and economic aid.”

The Reuters lede by David Brunnstrom and Steve Holland had a similar misreading:

The U.S. special envoy for North Korea laid out an extensive list of demands for North Korean denuclearization on Thursday that is likely to anger Pyongyang, even as President Donald Trump said the date and place for a second summit was set and hailed “tremendous progress” in his dealings with the country…Stephen Biegun said North Korea would need to declare all its nuclear and missile programs and warned that Washington had “contingencies” if the diplomatic process failed.

They subsequently toned down the lede, but missed the hints of concessions:

Washington is willing to discuss “many actions” to improve ties and entice Pyongyang to give up nuclear weapons, the U.S. special envoy for North Korea said on Thursday, but set out an extensive list of demands for the North, including a full disclosure of its weapons program. In a speech at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, envoy Stephen Biegun did not elaborate on what concessions the United States might make, but said the “corresponding measures” demanded by North Korea would be the subject of talks next week.

The New York Times Edward Wong’s lede got Biegun’s point on the nuclear inventory right:

A top American diplomat signaled on Thursday that the United States might no longer demand that North Korea turn over a complete inventory of its nuclear assets as a first step in the denuclearization process that President Trump is pursuing. The diplomat, Stephen E. Biegun, said in his first public speech that “before the process of denuclearization can be final, we must have a complete understanding of the full extent of the North Korean W.M.D. and missile programs through a comprehensive declaration.”[3]

But Wong quoted Biegun as reaffirming administration policy that it would “not lift sanctions until denuclearization is complete.” Biegun said something much more important, “We didn’t say we won’t do anything until you do everything”—implying that the administration was prepared to relax sanctions short of complete denuclearization. That critical offer could open the way to a far-reaching suspension of North Korean production of fissile material and possibly some missiles as well at the Trump-Kim summit meeting.

Some news accounts omitted any reference to Biegun’s detailing of Kim Jong Un’s offer of a significant step toward denuclearization and the US response:

Chairman Kim also committed, in both the joint statement from the aforementioned Pyongyang summit as well as during the Secretary of State’s October meetings in Pyongyang, to the dismantlement and destruction of North Korea’s plutonium and uranium enrichment facilities. This complex of sites that extends beyond Yongbyon represents the totality of North Korea’s plutonium reprocessing and uranium enrichment programs. Chairman Kim qualified next steps on North Korea’s plutonium and uranium enrichment facilities upon the United States taking corresponding measures. Exactly what these measures are are a matter I plan to discuss with my North Korean counterpart during our next set of meetings. From our side, we are prepared to discuss many actions that could help build trust between our two countries and advance further progress in parallel on the Singapore summit objectives of transforming relations, establishing a permanent peace regime on the peninsula, and complete denuclearization. Finally and importantly, in describing to us their commitment to dismantle and destroy their plutonium and uranium enrichment facilities, the North Koreans have also added the critical words “and more.” This is essential, as there is more—much more—to do beyond these facilities to follow through on the Singapore summit commitment to complete denuclearization.[4]

No North Korean leader had ever previously committed to dismantling all his fissile material production.

Biegun was asked about the Intelligence Community’s estimate, conveyed in congressional testimony last week on its Worldwide Threat Assessment, that “North Korea is unlikely to give up all of its nuclear weapons and production capabilities.” He did not quarrel with this conclusion but with the implication drawn by some news reports that the estimate undercut rather than supported the need for diplomatic give-and-take:

So my frustration isn’t with the accuracy of the information. It’s how it’s presented and how it’s interpreted. You cannot divorce the intelligence information from policy. The intelligence information is critical as an underpinning for the policy, but the policy is to address the threat and that’s what my frustration was last week.[5]

Readers might well share his frustration over the news media’s interpretation.

During the Bush years, as it had done previously, Pyongyang showed some willingness to accept verification when it saw Washington moving away from enmity but balked when it did not.

In September 2005, a US commitment to reconciliation with the DPRK would open the way to verification—only to be stalled by US failure to follow through.

The 2005 Six-Party Joint Statement

Pyongyang grudgingly accepted a Six-Party joint statement incorporating the main goal Washington was seeking, a pledge to abandon “all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs.” In return, Pyongyang insisted on phased reciprocal steps by Washington to reconcile—end enmity—as it eliminated its nuclear programs. The September 19, 2005, joint statement exemplified that aspect: “The six parties agreed to take coordinated steps to implement the aforementioned consensus in a phased manner in line with the principle ‘commitment for commitment’ and ‘action for action.’”

In the joint statement, the United States undertook to “respect [the DPRK’s] sovereignty,” diplomatic code for not attempting to overthrow its government, and said it “has no intention to attack or invade the DPRK with nuclear or conventional weapons.” It pledged to “take steps to normalize their relations subject to their bilateral policies.” It committed to “respecting” Pyongyang’s right to nuclear power and “agreed to discuss at an appropriate time the subject of the provision of light-water reactors [LWRs] to the DPRK.”

Yet the accord was still on the negotiating table when Washington began backtracking. In a closing plenary statement on September 19, US negotiator Christopher Hill announced the US decision to “terminate” the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), the international consortium set up to provide the light water reactors (LWRs).[1] Later that day, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice implied that the “appropriate time” for discussion of replacement reactors was when hell froze over: “When the North Koreans have dismantled their nuclear weapons and other nuclear programs verifiably and are indeed nuclear-free…I suppose we can discuss anything.” Pyongyang responded strongly. Calling the LWRs “a physical guarantee for confidence-building,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman said, “The basis of finding a solution to the nuclear issue between the DPRK and the US is to wipe out the distrust historically created between the two countries and a physical groundwork for building bilateral confidence is none other than the US provision of LWRs to the DPRK.”[2] Even worse, having asserted in the September 19 accord that the US had “no intention” of attacking the North “with conventional or nuclear weapons” and having pledged to “respect [DPRK] sovereignty” and renounce military attack and regime change, Hill undercut those commitments in prepared testimony to Congress days later. He echoed an old refrain, “All options remain on the table.”

Worst of all, the administration started taking action under the Illicit Activities Initiative (IAI) to put a roadblock in the way of negotiations. On September 15, the day that the Six Party accord was reached but two days before it was made public, the US Treasury Department capitalized on an investigation of money-laundering at the Banco Delta Asia in Macao to convince banks around the globe to freeze North Korean hard currency accounts—some with ill-gotten gains from illicit activities, but many with proceeds from legitimate foreign trade. A senior US administration official described its sanctions strategy this way: “Squeeze them, but keep the negotiations going.” In the words of Undersecretary of State Robert Joseph, “We believe that they will reinforce the prospect for success of those talks.” What did success imply? A senior State Department official put it differently: IAI turned Six Party talks into nothing more than “a surrender mechanism.”

Far from giving Washington leverage, the financial sanctions provoked Pyongyang to retaliate. On July 4, 2006. it conducted seven missile test-launches including one of a longer-range rocket, the Taepodong-2. The launches spurred China to vote for a US-backed resolution in the UN Security Council condemning the tests and threatening sanctions. Undaunted, North Korea immediately undertook preparations for a nuclear test, which it carried out on October 9, 2006. In announcing the nuclear test three days before conducting it, the DPRK Foreign Ministry denounced the UN Security Council resolution as “a de facto ‘declaration of war’ against the DPRK,” and added, “The US extreme threat of a nuclear war and sanctions and pressure compel the DPRK to conduct a nuclear test, an essential process for bolstering [our] nuclear deterrent, as a corresponding measure for defense.” Nevertheless, the North insisted that its aim of negotiated denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula remained unchanged. As did its price—an end to enmity: “The ultimate goal of the DPRK is not ‘denuclearization’ to be followed by its unilateral disarmament but one aimed at settling the hostile relations between the DPRK and the US and removing the very source of all nuclear threats from the Korean Peninsula and its vicinity.”[3]

On October 31, three weeks after the nuclear test, President Bush reopened negotiations. He authorized Ambassador Hill to meet with his DPRK counterpart and offer a compromise on the frozen North Korean accounts in the Banco Delta Asia, opening the way to diplomacy to implement the September 2005 joint statement. The result was a first-phase agreement on February 13, 2007, to suspend nuclear testing and shut down the North’s reactor and reprocessing facility at Yongbyon under IAEA monitoring. A second phase agreement concluded on October 3, 2007, required the North to turn over “a complete and correct declaration of all its nuclear programs” and to disable the plutonium facilities at Yongbyon, making it more time-consuming and costly to restart them. That would also reduce Pyongyang’s nuclear leverage. In return, the United States agreed to ease sanctions under the Trading with the Enemy Act and delist the DPRK as a “state-sponor of terrorism.” In addition, other parties pledged to supply North Korea with energy aid.[4] The second-phase agreement contained no mention of verifying the North’s declaration, and was left to a successive phase of implementation.

A willingness to move away from enmity had reopened the way to accommodation.

Seoul and Tokyo Question Verification

The Bush administration, however, failed to sustain this promising course because of pressure from South Korea and Japan. On June 26, 2008, as required under the October 2007 accord, the DPRK turned over a written declaration of its plutonium program worked out in bilateral talks with the United States. Reportedly, North Korea declared that it had separated 38 kilograms of plutonium—at the low end of US estimates. In a side agreement with Washington, Pyongyang committed to disclose enrichment and proliferation activities, including help given to Syria to build a nuclear reactor that Israel destroyed in 2007. Many questioned whether the declaration met the requirement of being “complete and correct” as prescribed in the October 2007 agreement. The dispute once again turned on how much plutonium the North had reprocessed before the end of 1991, as well as its help for Syria’s reactor.

Washington shifted gears and demanded arrangements to verify Pyongyang’s declaration before the disabling of Yongbyon was completed, contrary to the October 2007 agreement that did not provide for verification in the second phase of denuclearization. On the day that Pyongyang handed over its declaration, the White House announced the relaxation of sanctions under the Trading with the Enemy Act and delisted the North as a “state-sponsor of terrorism”—but with an important caveat. “[B]efore those actions go into effect, we would continue to assess the level of North Korean cooperation in helping to verify the accuracy and completeness of its declaration,” Secretary of State Rice announced at the Heritage Foundation on June 18. “And if that cooperation is insufficient, we will respond accordingly.” Rice recognized that Washington was moving the goalposts: “What we’ve done, in a sense, is move up issues that were to be taken up in phase three, like verification, like access to the reactor, into phase two.”[5]

The DPRK agreed in talks with the United States to a Six-Party verification mechanism and visits to its declared nuclear facilities, a review of documents, and interviews with technical personnel. These commitments were made public later but, undisclosed at the time, the DPRK also orally promised to cooperate on verification during the dismantlement phase.

These pledges failed to placate new hardline governments in South Korea and Japan who demanded a written verification protocol. President Bush went along. After US officials gave the North Koreans a draft with demands for highly intrusive monitoring, the White House announced in late July that it was delaying the delisting of the DPRK as a “state-sponsor of terrorism” until they accepted.

North Korea was predictably swift in reacting to what it viewed as the US reneging on the October 2007 accord. It suspended disabling on August 14 and began to restore the Yongbyon plutonium facilities. The North also attempted to airlift WMD equipment to Iran in a transparent threat to resume the proliferation activities that it had forsworn under the October 2007 accord.[6] On August 26, citing the failure to delist the DPRK as a “state-sponsor of terrorism,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman accused the United States of an “outright violation” of the October agreement and threatened to resume plutonium production at Yongbyon. Verification was to be fulfilled in the final phase of denuclearization, the spokesman noted. Adding that the September 2005 agreement had called for denuclearization of the entire Korean Peninsula, he demanded verification to ensure that no nuclear weapons had been reintroduced “in and around South Korea.”[7] Subsequently, the North barred IAEA inspectors from the Yongbyon facility.

Reconciliation Succeeds Again, Momentarily

US negotiator Hill, armed with a revised draft protocol, went to Pyongyang for talks with Kim Kye Gwan on October 1-3 in order to salvage the freeze and ongoing disablement at Yongbyon. Kim stopped short of accepting his proposal but did agree to “full access” for the IAEA and “experts of the six parties” to “provide consultancy and assistance” for “safeguards appropriate to non-nuclear-weapons states.” He included access to “personal notebooks” and records, “interviews with technical personnel,” “forensic measurements of nuclear materials and equipment,” and “environmental samples and samples of nuclear waste” at the three declared sites at Yongbyon—the 5 MWe reactor, reprocessing plant and fuel fabrication facility. That could have been enough to determine how much plutonium North Korea had produced. If those measures did not suffice, Kim also accepted “access, based on mutual consent, to undeclared sites,” according to a Department of State October 11 briefing. It also disclosed that “[t]he US-North Korea agreement on these verification measures has been codified in a joint document between the United States and North Korea and certain other understandings, and has been reaffirmed through intensive consultations.” These measures “will serve as the baseline for a verification protocol,” which came in the third phase of implementation.

That day, President Bush overrode objections by Japan and South Korea to the lack of a formal verification protocol and delisted the DPRK as a “state-sponsor of terrorism.” In the first week of December, Tokyo and Seoul signaled their intent to raise objections in Six-Party Talks. The North, in turn, backed away from inclusion of environmental sampling in the list of verification measures stating publicly: “The agreement includes no paragraph referring to the collection of samples. To demand what is not mentioned in the written agreement…is an infringement upon sovereignty as it is little short of seeking a house search.”

The topic was discussed at a December 8-11, 2008, meeting of the Six-Party Talks. China tried to paper over the differences in its chairman’s statement, but there was no disguising the threat to suspend energy aid by South Korea, Japan and the United States unless the DPRK accepted a written verification protocol. Departing from the talks, DPRK envoy Kim Kye Gwan made it clear the North would retaliate for any backtracking from previous commitments and if energy aid was “suspended” by adjusting “the speed of disablement work at nuclear facilities.” Tokyo and Seoul insisted on halting energy aid, and Washington went along. Pyongyang then retaliated by expelling the IAEA inspectors and advancing its weapons programs.

Once again, when US reconciliation with the DPRK faltered, so did verification.

Conclusion

Past performance, as they say on Wall Street, is no guarantee of future results. Yet, if there is one takeaway from this history of verification in North Korea, it is that cooperation begets cooperation. The test of that proposition will come prior to a North Korean declaration of its fissile material and nuclear weapons stocks when the United States seeks access to the North’s nuclear test sites, uranium mines, facilities to refine the ore into metal and turn it into a gas to run through centrifuges, and enrichment plants and reactors, to determine how much fissile material it could have produced.

Any attempt to secure access to its nuclear facilities, not to mention its nuclear materials and weapons, will require a sustained US effort to end enmity with North Korea. The message from Pyongyang seems clear: no verification without reconciliation.

]]>For North Korea, Verifying Requires Reconciling: The Lesson from A Troubled Past—Part Ihttps://www.38north.org/2018/12/lsigal121418/
Fri, 14 Dec 2018 20:46:24 +0000https://www.38north.org/?p=16687The usual story going around Washington is that North Korea has no intention to denuclearize or to provide a complete…

The usual story going around Washington is that North Korea has no intention to denuclearize or to provide a complete and accurate declaration of all its nuclear facilities and inventory and allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) access to verify that declaration. According to this story, North Korea reneged on promises to take these steps in the past, and instead, temporarily suspended production of plutonium, impeded unfettered access for IAEA inspectors, secretly sought the means to enrich uranium, expelled the inspectors, and resumed plutonium production when its enrichment activity was challenged.

This narrative is incomplete and misleading, because it ignores the crucial link between Pyongyang’s willingness to accept US requests for verification and Washington’s willingness to take steps to end enmity with North Korea. There is, in short, another way to interpret the troubled history of US-North Korean negotiations on verification.

No Verification without Reconciliation

Invoking international law as decreed by the UN Security Council and imposing UN sanctions to punish North Korean transgressions—the crime-and-punishment approach—has never worked with Pyongyang. North Korea views verification as a path to a fundamentally new relationship with the United States. In return for denuclearization steps, it wants Washington, in the words of the Agreed Framework that the two signed in 1994, to “move toward full normalization of political and economic relations”—or end enmity and reconcile, starting with a peace declaration and some easing of or exemptions from US sanctions.

To judge from what North Korean officials have told US officials and ex-officials for years, reconciliation entails the normalization of political and economic relations, a “peace regime” on the Korean Peninsula, and potentially an alliance like the one the United States has with South Korea that would be backed by a continuing US troop presence on the peninsula rather than withdrawal. Pyongyang has offered to dismantle its Yongbyon nuclear complex in return for “corresponding measures” and hinted that it is willing to let the United States, not the IAEA, monitor that dismantlement. Pyongyang has seen the IAEA as treating it unfairly ever since 1993, when the Agency demanded a special inspection of its nuclear waste sites to determine whether it had reprocessed more plutonium than it had initially declared in 1992. Pyongyang likely views the IAEA as a US accomplice in the crime-and-punishment approach. And since the IAEA cannot satisfy the North’s desire for US reciprocity, never mind get Washington to reconcile, it likely wants US inspectors on the hook for verification—at least for now—to assure compliance.

Washington has moved part way to satisfy Pyongyang. It has put the peace declaration on the negotiating table. And it is no longer insisting on a complete declaration of North Korea’s nuclear assets as the first step in implementing the commitment it made at the Singapore Summit to “work toward complete denuclearization.” Instead, it seems prepared to phase in the declaration, starting with the location of its plutonium reactors, reprocessing and enrichment sites. Before asking for the amount of fissile material and number of weapons, it will seek access to the North’s nuclear test sites, uranium mines and sites where the uranium ore is refined and turned into a gas for enriching. This nuclear archeology will better enable it to assess how much fissile material the North could have produced. Vice President Mike Pence hinted at this nuclear archeology on November 15 when he spoke of “a plan …for identifying all the development sites,” and “allowing for inspection of the sites.”

The Initial Declaration

On September 27, 1991, President George H.W. Bush announced the removal of all US nuclear weapons from Korea. Within a month, North Korea halted the reprocessing of spent fuel to extract plutonium. On December 31, it concluded a Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula with South Korea pledging not to “possess facilities for nuclear reprocessing and enrichment.” On January 7, 1992, with President Bush in Seoul, South Korea announced the suspension of the annual Team Spirit joint military exercises. That very day, a DPRK Foreign Ministry spokesman announced its intention to sign a safeguards agreement with the IAEA.

On January 22, 1992, the first ever high-level meeting between a US and DPRK official took place with Under Secretary of State Arnold Kanter and Kim Yong Sun, the Korean Workers’ Party secretary for international affairs. On March 14, 1992, Pyongyang agreed to set up a Joint Nuclear Control Commission with Seoul to monitor their denuclearization accord. On April 10, the DPRK Supreme Assembly ratified its safeguards agreement with the IAEA. The following month, IAEA Director-General Hans Blix made an official visit to Yongbyon during which he toured the unfinished reprocessing plant and received a 150-page initial declaration inventorying Pyongyang’s nuclear material and equipment.

This sequence strongly suggests North Korea’s willingness to accommodate the United States on verification in return for US steps to end enmity.

What’s So Special about a Special Inspection?

During the Blix visit, DPRK officials asked for the IAEA’s help to acquire light-water reactors and supply them with nuclear fuel in return for abandoning reprocessing, a request that the IAEA had no ability to satisfy. When the North Koreans repeated the request to US diplomats in Beijing on June 1, Washington dismissed the idea out of hand. Things went downhill from there. The most surprising revelation in its declaration was that North Korea had reprocessed spent fuel once, extracting 90 grams of plutonium. In July 1992, an IAEA inspector took smear samples that revealed an “anomaly” in that declaration. They showed that the North had conducted reprocessing on three separate occasions in 1989, 1990 and 1991.

The IAEA reached no firm conclusion about the amount of plutonium extracted. Some US intelligence estimates put that amount at 1-2 bombs’ worth. Subsequent analysis by the nuclear labs would call that amount into question; it estimated the range from 90 grams to less than a bomb’s worth. But the original estimate would drive policy for many years to come and would prompt the IAEA to ask for a special inspection of nuclear waste sites at Yongbyon on February 12, 1993, a request that the North rejected.

Even worse, on October 8, 1992, Washington and Seoul decided to resume the Team Spirit joint military exercises the following March. At an October 22 meeting to work out nuclear inspections, the North demanded that the South cancel Team Spirit, or it would call off the talks on the Joint Nuclear Control Commission to implement verification. On March 8, 1993, Team Spirit kicked off. On March 12, the DPRK Foreign Minister gave 90 days’ notice of its intent to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), citing the Team Spirit “nuclear war rehearsal” and the IAEA Board of Governors’ “unjust” demand. From that point on, it would allow the IAEA to monitor some Yongbyon sites “for the continuity of safeguards” but, citing its unique status with regard to the NPT, it has never again allowed ad hoc routine inspections.

Failure to remain on the road to reconciliation had thrown nuclear inspections into a ditch.

The 1994 Agreed Framework

The “decision” to “withdraw” from the NPT was not final: the DPRK told the UN Security Council it would last “until the US nuclear threats and the unjust conduct of the IAEA against the DPRK will be recognized to have been removed.” It was an opening to diplomatic give-and-take that Washington seized.

On June 11, 1993, the United States agreed with the DPRK in their first ever joint statement to the principles of: “Assurances against threat and use of force, including nuclear weapons; peace and security in a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula, including impartial application of full-scope safeguards, mutual respect for each other’s sovereignty and non-interference in each other’s internal affairs; and support for the reunification of Korea.”

The North, in turn, “decided unilaterally to suspend as long as it considers necessary the effectuation of its withdrawal” from the NPT.

Months of back and forth between Washington and Pyongyang resulted in some forward movement but diplomacy broke down in March 1993 with the collapse of the “Super Tuesday,” arrangement intended to secure forward movement in the North’s discussions with South Korea and the International Atomic Energy Agency, both important players in dealing with the nuclear issue. The crisis reached a climax in May 1994 when the North began unloading plutonium-laden spent fuel from its reactor but was defused when former President Jimmy Carter met with Kim Il Sung.

Four months of further negotiations yielded the 1994 Agreed Framework that October. In return for US willingness to “move toward full normalization of political and economic relations,” including the provision of two light-water reactors and heavy fuel oil in the interim, the DPRK suspended the operation of its reactor and reprocessing plant at Yongbyon pending their eventual dismantlement and put the spent nuclear fuel unloaded from its reactor that May into dry casks under around-the-clock monitoring by the IAEA for “continuity of safeguards.”

Upon completion of the supply contract for the reactors, the North pledged to permit ad hoc and routine inspections; it also promised that once a “significant portion” of the LWR project was completed, but before delivery of key nuclear components, it would come into full compliance with its safeguards agreement and take all the steps deemed necessary by the IAEA to verify the accuracy of its questionable 1992 initial declaration of nuclear material. The North thereupon shut down the reactor and reprocessing plant and granted access for the IAEA to monitor it.

The accord showed how steps to end enmity might facilitate verification. But again, hopes would soon be dashed.

Scrapping the Agreed Framework

In 1997, after Washington had taken only minimal steps to end enmity, was slow to get the reactor project off the ground, and had seldom delivered the promised heavy fuel oil on schedule, the DPRK began warning that if the United States did not live up to the Agreed Framework, it was not obliged to do so either. It soon began to acquire the means to enrich uranium from Pakistan and elsewhere. Yet it made no attempt to reprocess the spent fuel stored under monitoring at Yongbyon or to restart its reactor. Six years would elapse before it would do so. By then, according to US intelligence estimates, it had foregone generating enough fissile material for 100 nuclear weapons. It had also allowed its nuclear facilities, worth many millions of dollars, to deteriorate to a point where they could not be salvaged.

Nevertheless, the Bush administration, seizing on intelligence that the North was stepping up its acquisition of centrifuges and other uranium enrichment equipment, confronted it in October 2002. Spurning a North Korean offer to negotiate on the issue and ignoring opposition from South Korea and Japan, Washington suspended shipments of promised energy aid, thereby tearing up the Agreed Framework.

While US forces were tied down preparing to invade Iraq, North Korea retaliated by expelling the IAEA inspectors. It then reprocessed the spent fuel removed from the reactor in 1994 and extracted five or six bombs’ worth of plutonium, which, when weaponized, would allow it to conduct nuclear tests for the first time. It also moved to restart its reactor, ramped up its enrichment effort, and aided Syria in constructing a reactor of its own.

Had Washington lived up to its obligations, would Pyongyang have done so? There is no way to know for sure. But IAEA monitoring was the first victim of US failure to reconcile.

]]>The New York Times’ Misleading Story on North Korean Missileshttps://www.38north.org/2018/11/lsigal111318/
Tue, 13 Nov 2018 18:39:35 +0000https://www.38north.org/?p=16551North Korea is moving ahead with its ballistic missile program at 16 hidden bases that have been identified in new…

North Korea is moving ahead with its ballistic missile program at 16 hidden bases that have been identified in new commercial satellite images…The satellite images suggest that the North has been engaged in a great deception: It has offered to dismantle a major launching site—a step it began, then halted—while continuing to make improvements at more than a dozen others that would bolster launches of conventional and nuclear warheads.

That is the ominous lede of a story by David Sanger and William Broad in The New York Times on Monday, November 12. Substituting tendentious hyperbole for sound reporting may convince editors to feature a story on page one, but it is a disservice to readers.

The United States and North Korea have yet to conclude an agreement that inhibits deployment of missiles by Pyongyang, never mind requiring their dismantlement. Nor has Washington yet offered the necessary reciprocal steps that might make such a deal possible. A negotiated suspension of missile deployment and production should follow a halt to fissile material production and take precedence in talks over a complete declaration of North Korea’s inventory of nuclear and missile assets.

In contrast, Adam Taylor’s story in Tuesday’s Washington Post posed the right question and reported the right answer:

Are these bases evidence that North Korea is cheating on the agreement it reached in June, when President Trump met North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore? Analysts say the answer is no—although there are plenty of caveats.

The New YorkTimes story is based on a careful report by Joseph S. Bermudez, Victor Cha and Lisa Collins that makes no such claim. In fact, as the report acknowledges, the Sakkanmol Missile Operating Base and 15 others have long been observed by US intelligence, 13 of them by Bermudez himself.

Far from “moving ahead with its ballistic missile program,” Bermudez notes that “only minor infrastructure changes were observed” at this particular site since Kim Jong Un came to power in December 2011.

As for the New YorkTimes’ claim that North Korea is “continuing to make improvements at more than a dozen others that would bolster launches of conventional and nuclear warheads,” while that is quite possible, the report by Bermudez, et al., does not support that contention. It says that Sakkanmol has Hwasong-5 and -6 (also designated Scud B and C) missiles based there since the early 1990s. It is conceivable that some of these short-range missiles may have nuclear warheads, but it seems more likely that the missiles are conventionally armed and part of the DPRK’s effort to counter US-ROK conventional superiority.

It is also possible that intermediate-range missiles capable of reaching Japan could be co-located at some such bases but Bermudez, et al. have not detected any at Sakkanmol.

Negotiating a halt to the deployment and production of IRBMs and ICBMs is much more urgent than addressing short-range missiles, which might remain in place as long as they are not nuclear-armed but are part of the North’s conventional deterrent.

There is more than enough to do in negotiating constraints on and the elimination of North Korea’s nuclear and missile threats without exaggerating them and prematurely accusing Pyongyang of bad faith or calling into question President Trump’s wisdom for trying nuclear diplomacy in earnest.

]]>Toward a Ban on Deployment and Production of Kim’s Missileshttps://www.38north.org/2018/11/lsigal110518/
Mon, 05 Nov 2018 20:00:13 +0000https://www.38north.org/?p=16489By suspending test-launches of missiles before completing the development of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), Kim Jong Un opened the…

By suspending test-launches of missiles before completing the development of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), Kim Jong Un opened the door to a summit meeting with President Donald Trump and gave the most important sign to date of his willingness to negotiate denuclearization.

While the most urgent step in talks is to explore Kim’s offer to dismantle the nuclear facilities at Yongbyon, starting with the suspension of his fissile material production there and elsewhere in the country, attention needs to be paid next to the missile program even before demanding a comprehensive inventory of the North’s nuclear and missile facilities and assets.

A verifiable halt to further production and deployment of intermediate- and intercontinental-range missiles is worth seeking. Such a halt may be more negotiable than is commonly believed if the North faces limits on the number of powerful missile engines it acquired from Russia and Ukraine in the immediate aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union. While North Korea has developed most components of its missile and nuclear arsenal indigenously, some experts like Michael Elleman and Markus Schiller doubt that it has managed to manufacture engines for longer-range missiles on its own.[1]

A production halt might be verifiable by satellite reconnaissance or sensors placed near plant facilities. Although the number of final assembly sites is low, many more plants—not all of them at known locations—contribute to missile production, making remote monitoring by national technical means somewhat problematic. Ideally, Kim’s apparent willingness to entertain on-site inspections at Yongbyon will eventually be extended to missile production sites. Portal and perimeter monitoring at such sites, analogous to that under the INF and START treaties, might enable on-site observers to distinguish production of shorter-range missiles, which could still be produced, from their longer-range brethren, which could not.

A halt to deployment of mobile missiles presents difficulties of its own. On-site inspections like those spelled out in START Annexes 2 and 3 would be the preferred way to monitor deployments, but such arrangements may prove difficult and time-consuming to negotiate.

An interim solution that relies on cooperative measures may be possible. When the possibility of limiting intermediate-range Soviet forces was first examined within the US government in 1979-1980, it was considered both doubtful that the Soviet Union would agree to eliminate their newly deployed SS-20s and undesirable, at least by some, that the United States would abandon deployments of Pershing and cruise missiles altogether. Instead, it was assumed that numerical ceilings would be negotiated. It was also assumed that the Soviets would not agree to on-site inspection.

The SS-20s—unlike North Korean longer-range missiles—were all solid-fueled, making them much easier to move than liquid-fueled missiles which needed to be accompanied by fuel trucks and fueled in the field, limiting their mobility. Yet mobile missiles were best thought of as movable, like a house, on paved or at worst unpaved roads, but off-road mobility was thought to be limited because it risked damaging the missiles. Moreover, they could not range far afield, but were tethered to main operating bases. These bases were sufficiently distant from one another that the missiles could not be quickly transported from one base to another.

To monitor the number of deployed missiles under such assumptions, a scheme was developed to take advantage of the standard operating practices of Soviet missile units. At various intervals, a base would be open to overhead reconnaissance. All the missiles would be required to return to base, be deployed outside their garages or caserns, and leave their sliding roof garages open for several days to allow satellites to count the missiles. Because the missiles on display would be more vulnerable to attack, such “parades” would be held at one base at a time. Missiles at other bases would be free to roam to avoid jeopardizing the entire force to a knockout blow. The scheme did not cover non-deployed missiles, which in theory could be reloaded onto heavy trucks, called transporter-erector-launchers or TELs, and fired after the first missile volley was launched. While reloads could not be counted and monitored in this scheme, the threat that more than a few reloads could be launched was considered unlikely.

The idea of parades was overtaken by events when the Soviets agreed to a ban with an on-site inspection.

Nevertheless, could this parade scheme be applied to monitoring a halt to the deployment of North Korean missiles? That depends on satisfying several key conditions. The missiles would have to be tethered to main operating bases and the bases would have to be sufficiently far apart to reduce the chances that the missiles would be relocated. North Korean missiles secured off-base might be more detectable than the SS-20s were because they would likely be accompanied by fuel trucks and other companion vehicles. Any movement might give off telltale infrared signals. One difficulty in the North Korean case is that longer-range missiles might be co-located with shorter-range ones, although it may be possible for high-resolution cameras to distinguish them.

Would such a scheme be practical in the interim before more permanent on-site arrangements can be negotiated? It is worth further study—but only if the United States is willing to accept “corresponding measures,” such as North Korean overflights of US bases in South Korea analogous to those permitted under the Open Skies Treaty in Europe. As with all verification measures, a willingness to satisfy some of the North’s political objectives will be critically important for success.